NTSC DVD for PAL Replication

seanmccoy wrote on 3/27/2012, 5:00 PM
Hey all. Just finishing up a concert video, started and finished in 29.97 NTSC, and the company is also asking for a master for European distribution. Can I just send them an NTSC master and they'll be able to deal with the conversion before replication? Or do I need to do a PAL conversion in Vegas, or DVDA? Problem is I only have NTSC players so I wouldn't be able to check the PAL master in my consumer system before sending it off. Thanks for any advice.

Comments

PeterDuke wrote on 3/27/2012, 6:38 PM
There is a strong likelihood that PAL viewers would be able to play a NTSC DVD, but no guarantee.

You could do the conversion in Vegas, but changing the frame rate and size necessarily compromises the result.

You may be interested in this thread:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=768368
seanmccoy wrote on 3/27/2012, 6:51 PM
Thanks, Peter. Yikes, that's a scary looking thread! This project was ripped off a DVD to begin with, so quality isn't as big a factor as normal. The music company hasn't given me any specs or requests of any kind, so I don't know what they're expecting. I don't do much authoring, but I figured that this process must happen all the time, so there must be some standard operating procedure for it.
PeterDuke wrote on 3/27/2012, 11:39 PM
Well, as I said, you could do this in Vegas.

Start off with project properties that match your source (NTSC). Be sure to set a deinterlace method in the project properties to "blend" or "interpolate", so that Vegas will process field by field, not frame by frame. Then render to the desired PAL template.

The video properties may be set to "smart resample", "force resample" or "disable resample". You might like to experiment with these settings.
seanmccoy wrote on 3/27/2012, 11:50 PM
I definitely will go ahead and render a PAL conversion, just in case they do ask for it. The research I've done confirms that the NTSC/PAL issue is rapidly disappearing, but isn't entirely gone yet. As this DVD is essentially the "bonus" part of a CD/DVD set, it could be the company manufacturing it just isn't concerned with the small likelihood of incompatibility amongst its European customers. Thanks again for the help.